by Julia Baird
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Mark Twain sat in one of the temporary wooden stands on the Strand to watch the Jubilee procession. Troops from Australia, India, Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the West Indies made their way around London, looping from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Twain, who was then living in Europe and had been commissioned to report on the Jubilee for the San Francisco Examiner, was dazzled. He wrote: “British history is two thousand years old, and yet in a good many ways the world has moved further ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand years put together….She has seen more things invented than any other monarch that ever lived.” Since Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, the lives of people in her country and around the world had been transformed by the invention of the railway, steamship, telegraph, telephone, sewing machine, electric light, typewriter, camera, and more.
Victoria had reigned longer than any British monarch before her, and she was the head of the largest empire in history. They were cheering, Twain wrote, “the might of the British name,” for “sixty years of progress and accumulation, moral, material and political.” From 1558 to 1603, Queen Elizabeth ruled a land of a hundred thousand square miles and fewer than five million people, but by the late 1800s, Victoria oversaw one-fourth of the inhabitable part of the world containing four hundred million people. Over her lifetime, the number of people on the planet quintupled. Victoria witnessed the expansion of suffrage, the creation of cheap newspapers, and the development of copyright, anesthetics, and modern sanitation. Two hundred crimes previously subject to capital punishment were removed from the statute books. Citizens had won the right to unionize and seen a cut in daily working hours from twelve to eight. There had been a profound push toward equality. In the years she was queen, Victoria saw “woman freed from the oppression of many burdensome and unjust laws; colleges established for her,” as Twain wrote, “in some regions rights accorded to her which lift her to near to political equality with man, and a hundred bread-winning occupations found for her where hardly one existed before—among them medicine, the law, and professional nursing.”
At the time of Victoria’s birth, women were forced to play the role of “angels of the house”: they were seen as guardians of morality, which had effectively trapped them in their homes. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new generation tried to hack through old shibboleths. Many women were now living alone, or with female roommates, in a shift dubbed “the revolt of the daughters.” Married women, too, had gradually won some rights over their incomes, children, and bodies. In a crucial 1891 case, Regina v. Jackson, a husband—Mr. Jackson—had kidnapped his wife and detained her in his house with guards. He brought her to court for the “restitution of conjugal rights,” and lost. The judge held that he had no such right. This was hailed as a momentous decision that ended a husband’s right to control the body of his wife. (Just two years prior, a judge in Regina v. Clarence had held that a man had the right to rape his wife, even when suffering from gonorrhea. There was no concept of “marital rape” in England and Wales until 1991.) Regina v. Jackson built on the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which stated that a wife could control her own earnings and assets (and that a wife was a separate legal entity from her husband), and the 1886 Infant Custody Act, which introduced the idea that the children’s welfare must be considered when awarding custody.
Slowly, women gained toeholds in public life. In 1894, the new passage of the Local Government Act meant that all women who owned property could vote in local elections, become poor-law guardians (who managed local welfare for the unemployed, elderly, and vulnerable), and act on school boards. In 1897, as the country prepared for another round of Jubilee celebrations and troops gathered in Africa, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed, linking a host of smaller groups under the leadership of the redoubtable Millicent Garrett Fawcett. For the first time, a bill to give women the vote passed its second reading in the House of Commons. Every inch of progress would be hard and bitterly fought, but by the time of the Jubilee, the small advances for women were touted as a triumph of the British Empire.
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Women, men, young, old, British or foreign, the entire Diamond Jubilee spectacle was a crowing of empire; newspapers boasted of British achievement, all of it embodied in a tiny, squat, steadfast figure clad in black. Britain had won wars against Russia, and in India, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ashanti, Burma, Canada, New Zealand, and Egypt. Signs of progress were cited repeatedly: the grain tariffs had been repealed, the poor laws amended, and food was cheaper, housing better, wages higher. Members of Parliament no longer dressed in the old-fashioned outfits of silk stockings and pantaloons (as if “for a garden party”), and no one took snuff anymore while addressing the House of Commons. (Members of the American Congress did not give up their communal snuffbox until the mid-1930s.)
The cost of empire, though, was great. Millions of Chinese died in the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1842, again in 1856–60, and again in the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 that General Gordon had helped quash. Mass deaths of indigenous people in Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands occurred under Victoria’s rule. Native people were trotted before her as spectacle and trophy. Victoria marveled at their strangeness but, like most, did not consider what British occupation of their lands had meant for them. The assumption of many in England was that colonization meant only progress, not subjugation. There had been devastating famines in India and bloody wars in Afghanistan, and a scramble for the wealth of Africa that had seen the rights of local people brutally trampled. The spoils of empire sparkled on Victoria’s neck and wrists, hung on her walls, and scented her palace kitchens. The worst war was still to come, though, a barbaric war that would mark the beginning of the decline of the imperial expansion Victoria had championed.
Indian servants now carried the frail queen-empress from room to room. A life of sycophancy and lack of questioning meant that her every desire was indulged, and yet she still yearned for what she could not command: love and companionship. As she limped through the final decades of her life, most days were spent marking what had already passed. Yet she also longed for longevity; every New Year she prayed that she might be spared for another year, that her faculties would be left intact, especially what was remaining of her eyesight, and that she would be able to lead her country.
In Europe, the next generation of leaders was rising as dark currents of nationalism began to swell again and bulge against national borders. Boys who read about the great queen’s Diamond Jubilee would nurture fantasies of their own great nations. Adolf Hitler was eight that year, and toying with becoming a priest. Benito Mussolini was thirteen, rebelling against the monks who taught him, bullying fellow students, and amusing himself by hitting his only friend repeatedly over the head with a brick. Josef Stalin was eighteen, training with Russian Orthodox priests—and, like Wilhelm, had a deformed left arm that he tried to mask in portraits. The British and American opponents of these megalomaniacal future leaders were also training in politics and war. Franklin D. Roosevelt was fifteen when Victoria celebrated her Jubilee, a good student at an Episcopal boarding school, preparing to study at Harvard. Winston Churchill was twenty-two, and veering from fighting wars to reporting on them. Neville Chamberlain was a successful ship manufacturer at twenty-eight. In America, the progressive reformer Teddy Roosevelt, who was thirty-eight, had just been made assistant secretary of the navy; a few years later, in 1901, the cowboy-soldier would become vice president of the United States. But one person they all knew, and whose reach, lands, and wealth they envied, was the British queen.
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It is difficult to imagine that Victoria knew nothing of the ugly, brutal results of the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. In these years, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Britain, and France all greedily grabbed large tracts of Africa in pursuit of mineral wealth. Europeans
first reached the southernmost part of Africa in 1488, when the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. But it was not until 1652 that Dutch, German, and French Huguenot settlers established themselves in South Africa permanently—the ancestors of the Boers, or Afrikaners. In 1795 the British began to arrive. The first great rupture with Britain occurred in the early 1830s when the British abolished slavery, which the Boers viewed as important to their economy and in keeping with their sense of racial hierarchy. Many Boers migrated north in “the Great Trek” during the 1830s and 1840s to be free from British rule, and, after a string of bloody battles with the native Zulus, settled in the Transvaal (also known as South African Republic) and the Orange Free State. What we now know as South Africa was then comprised of four entities: the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, both Boer republics; and the two British colonies, Cape Colony and Natal.
Gems and gold would tear the fragile peace apart. When diamonds were discovered in Kimberley, a town in the Northern Cape, in 1869, the British dropped their vague acceptance of Boer control of wealthy African regions. Britain began to push for a South African federation in which they would be dominant, pointing to the number of British subjects who had settled in the region. Migrants streamed to the southern tip of the continent to pan for gold, and new cities mushroomed across remote plains.
When vast gold deposits were discovered in the Transvaal in 1873, President Thomas François Burgers encouraged foreigners—Uitlanders—to settle in his near-bankrupt state, even allocating them two seats in the local parliament. But in 1877, the British annexed the Transvaal, with the support of Disraeli (despite Britain’s having formally recognized its independence in 1852). Britain had just annexed large expanses of land across the globe, in Fiji, Malaya, and the West African Gold Coast, claiming it was forced to do so because of the dysfunction of indigenous governments. The Transvaal, though, was the final refuge of the Boers. Three years later, in 1880, they rose to fight for it, with some success. The defeated British agreed to keep the republic under their suzerainty, meaning Britain would have some control but the Transvaal would be internally autonomous. Victoria saw this as a humiliating concession and blamed Gladstone for carelessly losing this lucrative land.
From 1870 to 1914, Europe went from having control of 10 percent of Africa to 90. During these decades of plundering and colonization, many millions of Africans died; one of the most egregious and violent offenders was Victoria’s cousin. The Belgian king, Leopold II, the eldest son of her uncle Leopold, was responsible for some of the greatest human rights abuses of the nineteenth century. He ascended the throne in 1865, four years after Albert died, and took control of the Congo as a private citizen. He exploited the ivory and rubber trades there, forcing local populations to work for him. Those who did not meet his deadlines were maimed or killed. The Belgian government estimated that half of the Congo’s population of twenty million died under his rule before they forced Leopold II to hand control of the lands over to the state.
King Leopold II was creepy and frightfully ugly, with a particularly large nose. In 1885, he was named in a court case as having paid £800 a month for a regular supply of English virgins to be sent to Belgium; he especially liked girls aged ten to fifteen (Bertie had also been named as a client of the English brothel that King Leopold II had connections with). His cousin Queen Victoria continued to receive him—perhaps out of respect for his father. Marie Mallet, one of Victoria’s ladies of the bedchamber, found him repulsive. In 1897, she recalled a visit from Leopold II to Balmoral: “He can only shake hands with two fingers as his nails are so long that he dares not run the risk of injuring them. He is an unctuous old monster, very wicked, I believe. We imagine he thinks a visit to the Queen gives him a fresh coat of whitewash, otherwise why does he travel five hundred miles in order to partake of lunch.” When he visited Victoria, he complained of the Belgian parliament’s move toward universal suffrage, which she agreed was “greatly to be deprecated.” He also spoke to her about the Congo, though she does not say what about.
Leopold II made a fortune from the Congo. He taxed locals so harshly that many starved; local cannibalistic mercenaries massacred those who did not pay. The shocking human rights abuses were exposed by the British consul, Sir Roger Casement, in 1904, and later satirized by Mark Twain.*
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During Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, a cancer was growing on the throat of her son-in-law Fritz. Now, after her Diamond Jubilee, Victoria would discover a cancer was probably also spreading across the chest of his widow, her beloved daughter Vicky. Vicky had been afflicted with a host of odd ailments for decades: nerve pain, arthritis, colic, back pain, rashes, fevers, and swollen eyes. (Some continue to speculate that both she and her mother suffered from the amorphously defined porphyria that had felled King George III. This poorly understood disorder, whose symptoms range from migraine to madness, is so nebulous that it became a catchall diagnosis for anyone, especially those of royal or Hanoverian stock, who was suffering from a variety of maladies.) But in 1898, Vicky received a far grimmer diagnosis: breast cancer. She would outlive her mother by only five months.
All seven of Victoria’s surviving children had been present to mark her sixty years’ reign, as well as the two widowed spouses of Alice and Leopold (Prince Louis of Hesse and Princess Helena of Waldeck and Pyrmont). There had been much loss in the decade since her last Jubilee. A graying fifty-five-year-old Bertie was still grieving the loss of Eddy, his eldest son, and had been embarrassed by another scandal in 1891 when he was called to testify in a court case because a friend had cheated at cards. Now fifty-two and suffering poor health, Affie was bored at Coburg, trying to distract himself from money and marriage troubles with drink. Helena, the daughter whom Victoria neither favored nor bothered as much as the rest, was now forty-one, had four children (she had also lost two babies; one was stillborn and another died when just a few days old), and had immersed herself in charity work. Her husband, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, had unfortunately lost an eye when his brother-in-law Arthur shot him accidentally when out hunting. Arthur was happily married with three children. Beatrice was forty, widowed, and had four children. The family beauty, Louise, who had settled into companionate affection with her husband, Lord Lorne, hosted a fancy dress ball at Devonshire House on the night of the Jubilee, at which guests were invited to dress up in a historical costume predating 1820 (Victoria was born in 1819). Bertie dressed as the Grand Prior of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, while Alix came as the pretty, poetic French queen Marguerite de Valois.
In February 1899, less than two years after the Diamond Jubilee, Alfred’s only son, also named Alfred, died of what was pronounced to be tuberculosis. (Alfred junior, mad with rage over a fight with his mother about a commoner he wanted to marry, had in fact shot himself during his parents’ wedding anniversary celebration and survived only two more weeks.) To Victoria’s annoyance, he was buried on the tenth of February, her own sacred wedding anniversary. (She would never abandon her fixation on anniversaries, whether dark or bright.) Alfred senior—“Affie,” then the Duke of Saxe-Coburg—died of throat cancer the following year, just days shy of his fifty-sixth birthday; he was the third of Victoria’s children to die in her lifetime. On hearing the news, she cried out: “My 3rd Grown up child, besides 3 very dear sons-in-law. It is hard at 81!” She knew the horror of losing his own son had weakened him. It felt as if the year was full of “nothing but sadness & horrors of one kind & another.”
As Victoria was trundled around the gardens in her pony chair, the memories of the beautiful, clever young Affie pressed in on her vividly, and painfully. He had so resembled and pleased Albert, yet in moving to his father’s homeland in his adult years he had become miserable and loveless. Time wrinkled, and Victoria was hurled back to those golden hours when Affie and his siblings sat on Albert’s back, riding him like a horse, chortling when they toppled off, on so many happy days at Osborn
e and Balmoral. Now all was shadow. The day after Affie’s funeral in 1900, the Boers derailed another train and captured British prisoners. Just a few weeks later, one of Victoria’s grandsons would die fighting in Africa.
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On October 11, 1899, the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out. Few things concentrated Victoria’s mind as much as military conflict. She bade many of the troops farewell in person, and recorded details of the battles in her journal with a palpable anxiety. She was now eighty years old, but she maintained a keen interest in her army and continued to argue for more resources and men. While she did not see herself as a natural imperialist—writing of China, for example, that the world at large should not have the impression that we will not let anyone but ourselves have anything—she was eventually persuaded of the case for war in Africa. She believed that Britain should protect its subjects and territory. Her caveats were that the poor not be disproportionately burdened by a war tax and that the horses sent to fight be well treated.
The case made for war was straightforward enough. The public was told they needed to protect the oppressed Uitlanders in the Transvaal, most of whom were British citizens, against a tyrannical President Paul Kruger and his Afrikaner government. But several countries were also vying for control of the vast deposits of gold discovered in the Witwatersrand of Transvaal in 1886. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, went to South Africa as a volunteer doctor and said the war was simply a fight over “one of the great treasure chests of the world.”
In March 1899, the beleaguered Uitlanders sent a petition with over twenty-one thousand signatures to Victoria, making a direct appeal for protection and warning her that the Boers were preparing for war. They complained of the lack of a free press, the expulsion of British subjects at the will of the president, and overtaxation; they had few rights and were not allowed to meet. The police, explained Henry Ponsonby’s replacement, Arthur Bigge, “are entirely composed of Boers, and behave in the most arbitrary and indeed oppressive manner, and are responsible for the murder of one British subject.” Arthur Balfour advised Victoria that “without the threat of force, immediate or remote, it is certain that nothing will be done.” On October 10, 1899, the South African republics sent a forty-eight-hour ultimatum insisting the British evacuate their troops from Natal and the Cape. When they failed to budge, the Boers invaded British colonies and surrounded the crucial towns of Mafeking, Kimberley, and Ladysmith.